Two brothers go on an adventure across the land to find a cure for their sick father. A controller is required for this, since each brother is controlled by an analog stick. This may be one of the best fantasy adventures you’ll ever go on.

A fantastical neo-noir platformer all about shadows and old timey jazz and cabarets and all that good stuff. Gameplay’s a bit clunky but still very original, and the visual and narrative design are excellent, so I still highly recommend it.

Accidentally ejected from his spaceship, a spunky little one-wheeled robot must venture across an entire planet in hopes of returning home. Defunct asks of you one simple thing: simply to let go and enjoy the ride.

Yume Nikki. Got your attention? Good. Dreaming Sarah was directly inspired by the cult hit indie game. So if you want to aimlessly wander surreal dreamscapes with 2D platforming mechanics and interact with the strange denizens that reside therein, then this game is for you.

The story is standard fantasy fare, but it’s the assets that sell the game. The art and music are fantastic, the battle mechanics control like butter and make you feel totally awesome, and it’s an extremely enjoyable experience all throughout. And it was made by ONE GUY.

Don’t let the simple art style turn you off; The Dweller is an excellently designed puzzle game that tests the limits of your logical abilities. Plus, it has a very sinister underlying story to it, which you discover as you progress.

This game blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality. It is, at its core, a simulation of a 90’s style OS, where you, guest user, scour through a database in search of videos that would piece together the story of a particular woman’s involvement in a particular criminal case. Your goal is to discover the key aspects in this mystery as you spiral downward into this immersive experience that unfolds pretty damn well.

You’re a egg cell, I guess. You have an army of sperm, I guess. You fight other sperms and egg cells, I guess. (Hero of Many has a surprisingly emotional story that deals with cruelty, loyalty, friendship, love, and determination. I’m dead serious. It’s a great game.)

If you haven’t played this yet, do yourself a favor and find a way to play it. Your life is incomplete without it.

Store page: Available on PS3, PS4

Lumino City

point and click, puzzle, adventure, stop motion

Lumino City is a point and click adventure game where architects, artists, prop-makers, and animators came together to craft a beautiful hand-made experience. Yes, the graphics are made of real objects. It’s easy to see how much love and care went into making this and the result is one of the most charming games you’ll ever play.

Dash atop buildings with speed and grace in what may be the best parkour simulator out there. Top it off with a stellar soundtrack, stunning visual design in bold colors, and high-octane gameplay, and you have a one of a kind experience that you will not get anywhere else.

This is a game about wonder and adventure, magic and mystery, about our relationship with the past how it affects the world around us. It’s gorgeous, the soundtrack is lovely, and this is one of the greatest adventures you’ll ever go on in under 2 hours.

Before French gamedev Dontnod released the acclaimed Life is Strange series, their first game was this highly ambitious cinematic sci-fi beat-em-up called Remember Me. The script isn’t anything to write home about but the overall polish of the visual design is astounding. It’s like Blade Runner meets Mirror’s Edge meets Inception.

Might as well be the most unique puzzle game series ever created. The Room has you tinker with a strange contraption so as to unlock it and discover whatever secret lies within. There is a story here and it’s chilling.

You’re a lone robotic consciousness who wakes up in a garden. The voice of God talks to you through a computer terminal. You undertake several puzzles and tests to prove you are more than just machine. The Talos Principle touts itself as being a philosopical puzzler, and it does quite a good job at it.

Multiple AI entities with very distinct personalities fight for survival and find their purpose in a collapsing digital environment. The writing is hilarious and the narration does a spot on job of bringing these characters to life.

You’re a little warrior in a strange land full of deadly titans. You have only one arrow. You die in one hit. The catch is, the bosses die in one hit as well. If you can manage to bring out their weak points, that is. Extremely tight combat, well designed bosses, and a great visual aesthetic make for a great game.

So very few games pack as hefty an emotional punch as Undertale. It’s inventive in every way possible and is a landmark achievement in the RPG genre. It gets really difficult later on but it’s so worth it just to finish it.

Wanda is a short, cinematic puzzle adventure game starring two childlike robots who wake up from hibernation and find themselves in a dead and broken world. Now, the two form an unbreakable friendship as they traverse the post-apocalyptic wasteland. The puzzles can get frustrating af, but all in all, it’s adorable, the music is fantastic, and I cried for daaays.

You’re a scientist who believes the key to resurrecting your dead wife rests on another planet. You hatch an intricate plan: You are to exhume her from her grave, infiltrate the space station you work for, and steal a ship that could bring you to another planet, where your archaeological team had once discovered mystical alien ruins that harbor the key to eternal life. The Way is gorgeous in every respect, and is a welcome addition to the genre of cinematic platformers the likes of Another World and INSIDE.

A minimalistic puzzle game with an underlying spiritual adventure story. The puzzles are satisfying, the illustrations are simply gorgeous, and the music. The MUSIC. If you like fitting things into things and being rewarded with cool art, this game is a steal.

I have daydreams of a far-off place, in the company of people I don’t know. I swear they could be memories or premonitions, and whether they surface by intense nostalgia or a deep yearning, I can never tell. There is an ache in my chest, a void left by a missing past and a promise of the future.

Do you dream of transcendence? Do you dream of a planet whose only landmass is a giant strip of shoreline? Do you dream of lost gardens, of the drowning sun witnessed from a third floor window? Of breathing in the fog-blanketed mountain top air, air like whispers from the mouth of a grieving world, air so thin it stings your lungs, leaving tattoos in the shape of the life we ought to live? Do you dream of silence? Of synchronized heartbeats? Of untamed emotion? Of release and catharsis?

Do you dream of the complex societal machinery where true love is the most potent renewable resource, where the cogs that push humanity further into the unknown are fueled by high-octane unleaded empathy and compassion?

Do you dream that one day, we will take matters into our own hands, and fight tooth and nail for the things we believe in? That one day, all question marks will shed their curls, and all voids in our chests will cement into periods, and we will declare with full confidence that, yes, dreams do come true.

I’ve convinced myself that fantasy is to be found elsewhere, always forgetting that fantasy is not about escaping reality but dwelling excessively within it, where curiosity and wonder build the mundane anew. The tired mind consciously hallucinates, places Instagram filters, augments reality through virtual headsets, forgetting about the fire in our veins and the mythos of our stellar heritage.

And yet the pain remains, a cancer of the soul that refuses to let go, no matter how many times I’ve tried to fill it. How does one cure a black hole? You don’t; space would certainly have less secrets without it.

My head was spinning, and everything appeared in flashes. I squinted for clarity: The world was perpendicular and her face was the point of origin. Her Vantablack hair flowed nape-ward into a clip, from which it burst forth in wild curls, akin to a fire breather’s plume. Her eyes were dense and supermassive, and not even light escaped her gaze. Noticing that I’d partially restored my vision, she brought her hand up, revealing a micro-conflagration caught in between her fore and middle fingers.

“Do you mind?” she asked, as wisps of smoke wrapped about her.

“I didn’t even notice, manah.”

She studied me with a raised brow then took a slow, final drag and threw it backwards into the bonfire. “You’re a bad liar,” she said, her formality beginning to slacken, a change I was certainly not used to. She exhaled up and away from my face, with a simultaneous yawn that betrayed her fatigue. “And don’t call me that, at least for tonight. It’s the new millennium. We’re off duty. You have no obligation to me.” Something about that didn’t feel quite sincere.

“Then you have no obligation to me as well, manah. I’ll be okay.”

She looked at me, half-agape, like no one had ever the nerve to tell her what she could and couldn’t do. She looked like she was about to reply when a voice returned and momentarily ruptured my observable universe. The blurry image of a colleague handed her a basin, which she plopped onto the grass between us.

“Thank you. I can handle this; you may return to the celebration,” she told the blur, briefly reconstructing her rigid demeanor. “And try not to trick any more neophytes. I’m watching you.” The blur bowed in respect and headed back to throng with a larger blur on the other size of the bonfire. Her shoulders slumped back down.

“Just in case you need it,” she said, pushing the basin a little more in my direction. Then, silence, if silence was at all possible in a place like this.

You’ve known her since birth. She’s been there with you in your birth certificate. She helped you stumble your way past grade school math. She fell in love with your ex boyfriend and is now working at your office cubicle. You’ve blamed her for her past mistakes but she also stood up to you and blamed others, on many an occasion. She’s an inseparable part of you, and she will always take you where you need to go, using your own two feet. The rally cries have said it. The spray-painted ads have spelled it out. Millions of blogsters have used it in their hashtags. “I want a president who will never break up me. I want a president who likes the things I like. I want a president like me.”

You, yes, you, can uplift this country: All we need is your word and your votes are ours. Promise, against all odds, that you would put food on your plate, even if just a morsel; Obesity is killing thousands of children all over the world. Promise that you would haggle for tuition fees, which curriculum is the freshest, which one has been bitten by the least worms. Promise that anywhere you go, especially within worthwhile cities like half of Makati and half of Taguig, you will find a home, be it on the foot-wide sidewalks graciously provided so as to await future improvement by hired foreign city planners—or the banks of murky rivers within whose waters live ancient creatures beyond our understanding, which proves that if you can live there, you can live virtually anywhere—or on the islands of brick and dirt that divide the flow of traffic, islands symbolic of our diversity as a nation, roads and oceans swarming with vehicles made in neighboring countries. And promise me, for all that is good and mighty, that you will always compromise despite your dignity, for uplifting a nation’s morale is decidedly better at keeping the peace than pinpointing every single reason why this relationship does NOT work, and that we’re all living on sinking boats, like the actual islands that lay themselves ever so slowly into the ocean under the weight of all these SM malls, like the untended street islands that manage to sustain plant life due to the occasional waist-high flood, like the islands of our hearts, which know the flow of blood better than the skins on our wrists.

Surveys conducted in the better halves of Makati and Taguig have spoken: “I am the best president of myself, and I promise to save myself first, and everything will follow.”

Severian, an apprentice turned journeyman of the Order of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence, commonly known as the torturer’s guild of the Citadel begins his coming-of-age journey equipped with two items entrusted to him by his Master. First is the odd sword Terminus Est, filled with mercury. It is light to raise and weighty to descend, making for deadly blows. Second is the cloak in the tinct of the torturer’s guild. Its color is fuligin, a shade so dark no light reflects off its surface.

Here, he has recently been expelled from the guild in defiance of long-established traditions, and is making his way to the city of Thrax, where he shall serve the remainder of his banishment.

I regret to inform all my fans that there will not be a story today, on the 8th of March, in the year 2016 of our Lord and Savior, Keanu Jeevus. This unfortunate circumstance was the result of a long day’s worth of staring listlessly at the list of work I had to get done by today or else resume everything the next day. And you know what happens when backlog gets pushed further into the reaches of your folders. your workmates will see that you’re not doing a very good job and will be motivated to not do a good job themselves, for what is competition when your boss plans to remain where he is for all eternity? Then, work will pile up, and your folders will get thicker and thicker (the inverse is true in relation to your savings account) and soon, it’ll all burst like a huge data bubble, and some of the debris might get caught by stray radiowaves and WiFi signals and jam the cogs of the system that is the stock market. And you know what happens when shit happens at the stock market. Of course you don’t; no one does! It’s the butterfly effect, man. An insect farts or some shit in one part of the world and next thing you know, ISIS! It’s a topsy-turvy world out there. Take care, fam. Happy International Women’s Day.

There have been days I shut my eyes and return to the world of Nascentia, every day blessed and filled with warmth. Its citizens live a pampered life, eyes forever shut. They laze, blissful of the shackles that pin them to the soft ground. Consciousness exists in dreams that sprout, threadlike, from the ears and intermingle with one another. I touch the vines and they ask a very singular question: What lies on the other side when we are born, and what will we do till that time comes to pass? The answers are as numerous as the vines that have come and gone.

I dreamt along with the dwellers of Nascentia and saw that the outside world was just another link in a chain that goes on and on till reality breathes its last. I’d dreamt of the outside to the outside world, and even farther than that. I dreamt that when we perish, the energy that binds us will escape and come to rest on a planet reserved solely for each of us, and there, somewhere out there, shall an endless landscape of flowers bloom.

On one of my journeys, I entered this grave space of star systems that shine heavenly light so bright, not an inch of space held darkness—this collection of planets that house the energies of once-beings. I happened upon a planet feathered in white, with the tracest hints of yellow. As I drew closer, a sweet smell filled my lungs and entered my bloodstream, and immediately, I was at peace, despite knowing fully whose energy resided therein. I spent a while, in tranquil mourning, in the soft embrace of countless flowers, all jasminum sambac in scientific nomenclature.

What happens after the flowers perish is a story for another day, although I can say just about this for now: We will meet again one day, no matter what segment of the chain, our energies will surely overlap, and trust, if not powers beyond your control, your own resolve to make the journey fueled on naught but dreams and memories. We were destined for farther stars.